Newsroom crisis has to be bad news for diversity

I have never met an editor, from print or broadcast, who did not want the staff of his or her newsroom to reflect the diversity of the communities it served.

And I’ve never met an editor who claimed they had fully achieved it.

It is, I have no doubt, one of the reasons for the decline in influence of the UK regional press, particularly larger metro titles, Our communities went through a fundamental change – and we didn’t.

But my real fear is that the situation will get worse, not better. (more…)

Time for jaw, jaw not war, war in council paper furore

I am genuinely upset by this whole pathetic tirade over council newspapers.

It appears we’re on the way to openly branding councils as Stalinist regimes, churning out twisted propaganda and hell bent on the destruction of an oppressed local media.

At the same time we have the chairman of the Local Government Association  claiming that council newspapers do not operate as rivals. Utter tosh – she should read the stated objectives of council publications on her own members’ websites. You’d have to be on a flight with fairies to think that pulling advertising from a local paper and publishing your own 100,000-distribution freesheet wouldn’t have some effect. (more…)

Why British journalism deserves a Knight Foundation

One of the aims of the American Knight Foundation is as simple as it is powerful: “We want to ensure that each community’s citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy.”

The institution believes in putting its money where its mouth is – since it began half a century ago, it has invested $400 million in 1,000 projects. And with the US newspaper industry in meltdown, the Knight Foundation’s role as a launchpad for innovation has never been more in demand. (more…)

Why communities of interest come before hyperlocal

I first heard the word ‘hyperlocal’ around 20 years ago.

Not surprisingly, it was spoken by an American, Ralph Ingersoll III, who had recently shocked us all with his whirlwind takeover of the Birmingham Post & Mail and Coventry Evening Telegraph. No-one had even heard of him.

It was a crazy couple of years that ended in tears for Ralph and a management buyout for the rest of us. One of Ingersoll’s more daring wheezes was to shut a string of profitable free newspapers and replace them with 40-odd hyperlocal, hybrid freesheets – a tad bigger than A4 – for Birmingham’s local communities. (more…)

Will start-up journalists hit the most important deadline?

April 23, 2009, will be an important day for journalism.

It’s 150 years since the birth of the Rocky Mountain News … and the deadline set by former staffers, who lost their jobs when the title shut in February, to attract 50,000 subscribers for their new online-only venture.

If they make it, inDenvertimes.com will launch in early May. But, surrounded by mountains as they are, asking readers to stump up some $3million in five weeks, in the middle of a recession, is about as steep as it gets.

What’s more, news this week that both advertising revenues AND online page impressions fell dramatically after the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat folded its print edition can hardly be seen as an auspicious omen.

But there’s a difference.

The decision to make Taloussanomat web-only in late 2007 was made by a nervous management that lost sight of its market because its head was buried in red-inked revenue and circulation reports. The result, inevitably, was a lack of decision-making clarity. (more…)